By skyforbes My primary concerns were Adobe Premiere Pro, Illustrator and mpc-hc + madvr. I found Kdenlive and Inkscape to be suitable enough replacements for the first two, for my use case. I frequently watch HDR 10 content on my LG C1 and I get a much better picture quality with mpc-hc + madvr compared to something like VLC. However, I believe both mpc-hc and madvr are exclusive to Windows. But these are things I could live without for the time being. I also don't play any competitive multiplayer games, the only games I play from time to time are BG3 and Elden Ring, both of which are Gold rated in protonDB, and so lacking any other excuse it was time for me to nut up or shut up.
I narrowed down the list of distros I wanted to use to: Mint, Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. In the end I decided to play it safe and go with Mint Cinnamon. The installation went smoothly and it was much easier and less time consuming than installing Windows. I was pleasantly surprised that things like the Lenovo Legion "Fn + Q" shortcut to change operation modes worked out of the box. I installed this script from github to enable Lenovo Vantage features like toggling conservation mode on Linux.
I was able to install all my software packages and drivers from the Software Manager and Driver Manager respectively. My Neovim config worked with minimal changes made. LibreOffice felt more responsive and the startup was faster in Linux than in Windows. I also installed mpv for my multimedia needs; I appreciated how configurable and minimal the UI was. I installed the modernZ osc for mpv but the video titles were rendering as gibberish and the menu was laggy. Doing a bit of research it seemed the issue was that the version of mpv available in apt was too old. So I started working on building mpv from source and with a bit of troubleshooting and chatGPT help I was able to do it. The OSC now worked as expected! Though I think the image quality isn't as good as what I had with mpc-hc + madvr on Windows, it was acceptable.
I even installed Ryubing/Ryujinx for Nintendo Switch emulation and the performance I got in Mario Kart was about the same as it was in Windows. I had no trouble connecting my 8BitDo controllers to Ryujinx and Steam.
I used Mint for about 3 months and while I mostly enjoyed how easy it was to set everything up, my main pain point was how old some of the packages were. Things like undercurls for code diagnostics did not work in Neovim because of the version of WezTerm I had installed. I was able to fix it by adding the wezterm-nightly PPA to my package sources and installing that version. I also felt limited in terms of UI customization in Cinnamon. I did not like how sluggish Flatpaks felt and hated the fact that I had to use Flatpaks if I wanted newer versions of software (Kdenlive for example).
For these reasons I decided to move to Fedora 42 KDE edition. The installation process was straightforward except partitioning felt a bit confusing in the Anaconda installer (though my unfamiliarity with Btrfs could be a contributing factor to that). After the installation I immediately had a major problem: after running dnf upgrade my screen just went black. Force shutting down and turning my computer on again did not fix it. Luckily I was able to access the tty and realized after a bit of research that I had to install the Nvidia drivers manually. I followed the instructions on rpmfusion to install the drivers and the media codecs. After a reboot everything was working fine.
I thoroughly enjoyed the level of customization that KDE Plasma provided and the vastly newer packages DNF had to offer and it almost immediately solved a lot of the nagging issues I had with Mint. The KDE store also has an applet to toggle conservation mode so I no longer needed the github script for that. I will say however that Discover, the GUI Software Manager in KDE, is absolutely trash. It was so incredibly sluggish that it reminded me of the Windows Store! So most of the time I just installed packages from the terminal using DNF, but it also felt considerably slower when compared to apt in Mint.
The built-in method to download themes looks convenient on the surface but it doesn't work at all. I tried to install the Layan theme and some of the icons were missing in the system tray. Manually installing the theme did work however.
Shortly after, Fedora 43 was released, but I waited a week or two before upgrading and this is where all hell broke loose. plasmashell kept constantly crashing and whenever I booted up my computer I got the annoying "abrt crashed" alert. And often times after I updated my packages and restarted my computer I would get a black screen after the SDDM login screen. I had to force shut down and turn it on again for it to work. If the computer went to sleep after inactivity I would also have this black screen issue after logging in.
I tried uninstalling all the themes and switching to the default Breeze theme, uninstalled kvantum, plasma-panel-colorizer and even did a full system reinstall (this also gave me the opportunity to increase the size of the boot partition from 1 to 2GB) but the above issues persisted.
Around this time I became interested in CachyOS. It seemed like everything I wanted in a distro but the stories of instability and installation errors in the CachyOS subreddit gave me pause. If I did make the hop to CachyOS, it would be my first rolling-release distro. Although I was becoming much more familiar with how Linux worked this was still a bit scary, but I figured it was once again time to nut up or shut up.
I once again hopped distros and I am glad that I did. CachyOS gave me the best out-of-the-box experience out of the 3 distros that I tried. Switching the operation mode with the keyboard shortcut was now also reflected in the Power Profile panel in the KDE system tray and changing the profile in the menu changed the LED indicator on my Legion laptop. This is something that didn't happen in Fedora and I didn't even know this was possible.
All those issues I was having with KDE Plasma in Fedora were not present in CachyOS. Most importantly my laptop has never felt this snappy and responsive. The AUR is amazing and seems to have pretty much everything I will ever need. I also get more FPS in BG3 with cachyos-proton than I did in Fedora. I also appreciate that selecting Limine bootloader with Btrfs automatically sets up bootable snapshots with Snapper. This will definitely be handy with a rolling-release distro. Overall, I am really loving CachyOS so far!
I do still keep up with developments in the Windows world because I am the designated "IT person" in my family and they all use Windows. Though, I was able to convince my father to switch to Linux Mint; he mostly uses his PC to browse the internet, edit Word documents and make presentations. I haven't gotten any phone calls from him regarding computer troubles in quite some time!
TL;DR I started with Mint and found that it was a solid distro but the lack of newer packages caused some problems. I then switched to Fedora KDE which had vastly newer packages but the latest release was very unstable and the system felt slow. CachyOS was the best user experience out-of-the-box, striking a good balance between stability, responsiveness and bleeding-edge packages.
Edit: I'm adding some links below for the theme and wallpapers for those who are interested.
Theme name: rosepine-moon
Kvantum theme: https://github.com/rose-pine/kvantum/tree/master
KDE theme: https://github.com/ashbork/kde/tree/main
Widget CatWalk: https://store.kde.org/p/2055225
Widget Kurve [Audio Visualizer]: https://store.kde.org/p/2299506
Wallpaper: https://github.com/rose-pine/wallpapers/blob/main/rose_pine_contourline.png
Bridge 4 glyph (the logo in fastfetch): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/l16l6bb11d5ffn52xcrfj/AO1KgcnA9YUVOWY98ShrsgA?rlkey=dbl6g3nnn5hjn0kc113986mrt&st=k1ew3s3c&dl=0https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/l16l6bb11d5ffn52xcrfj/AO1KgcnA9YUVOWY98ShrsgA?rlkey=dbl6g3nnn5hjn0kc113986mrt&st=k1ew3s3c&dl=0
fastfetch config (original): https://github.com/cassiofb-dev/fastfetch-config/blob/main/presets/dragonball.jsonc
my dotfiles: https://github.com/pdadhikary/dotfiles